Let’s all ignore the data, critique low hanging fruit (“Antipode is geography! Therefore this list is stupid.”), and just repeat commonly shared subjective opinions in soc, eg, “Social Forces is supposed to be in third place! It’s an influential journal!”

^ That Social Forces is the third flagship journal in the discipline is not subjective, it is a broadly held intersubjective view among U.S sociologists.
And if you remove subfield journals and European generalist journals form that list, what happens?

Given that we are talking about U.S sociologists (which we may not do but the ASR/AJS/SF trinity is arguably a U.S sociology thing), I'd remove the European journals because US sociologists care less about those journals than U.S ones.

“Given that we are talking about U.S sociologists (which we may not do but the ASR/AJS/SF trinity is arguably a U.S sociology thing), I'd remove the European journals because US sociologists care less about those journals than U.S ones.”

This is what I’m criticizing. We just ignore the data and keep repeating our commonly held subjective opinions.

^ We focus on what is relevant to us, and for sociologists in the U.S the data largely support the ASR/AJS/SF trinity. One can of course lament that state of things but the reality is that U.S sociologists publish predominantly in U.S journals and European ones in European journals.

You’re missing the polemical point: of course an advisor would say “Submit to SF, it’s the third best!” despite the fact that it’s not based on the only (obv imperfect) measures we have.

And any reasons you give to defend its “top 3” status are far more arbitrary than the measures themselves.

Of course you should listen to the common claim that SF is top 3, not to these rankings. It’ll be better for your career because everyone believes it, but they believe it because everyone believes it, not because it’s based on data.

But what does that say about the blind spots of academic minds that claim to base beliefs on data and/or the utility of journal measures if they’re just disregarded for arbitrary reasons in order to confirm our priors?